The Death of Innocence

It was 1955. Television, still in its infancy, reflected the mores of the times. Sitcom parents slept in separate beds, the moms wore dresses around the house, covered with an apron during the hours of meal preparation, the dads dressed in suit and tie or at least a white shirt and sweater even around the house, foul language never was heard from the tube, infidelity and nudity were absent, violence occurred only in cartoons, and there was no sex or innuendo in shows or music. Commercials never mentioned diseases and undergarments were truly unmentionables and un-showables. And a half-hour show was almost a half-hour long since there were far fewer commercials.

Most families ate together without TV or radio blaring, and one-line jibes and put-downs between family members and friends had not yet displaced meaningful conversation. Many moms were stay-at-home parents and had supper on the table when dad returned from work. Our one television set (when there finally was one) was black-and-white, received four over-the-air channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, and WGN), and I was the remote (“Put on channel nine” or “Turn the volume up.”) The programs we watched were dictated by Dad – shows like “Sing A-long with Mitch Miller,” “Lawrence Welk,” “The Honeymooners” with Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” “I Love Lucy,” and “You Bet Your Life” with Groucho Marx. I recall how Dad got home from work at 5:30 and supper was immediately served, and even though “The Mickey Mouse Club” was on then, I couldn’t watch it because it was supper time.

Then life changed and the innocence of the era ended. On October 16, 1955, three days before my tenth birthday, John and Anton Schuessler (13 and 11) and their friend Robert Peterson, 14, went bowling and did not return home for supper. They lived about five miles from us on Chicago’s northwest side. Two days later, hikers found their naked, battered, strangled bodies in Robinson Forest Preserve alongside the Des Plaines River. We kids didn’t understand the ramifications of this event since nothing of this magnitude had ever occurred before, but our parents were shocked and worried and clamped down on our comings-and-goings. Photos of the Schuessler brothers’ funeral cemented our parents concern and fear. Then fourteen months later on December 28, 1956, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, 15 and 13, did not come home from a theatre, and their beaten, raped bodies were discovered 25 days later in Du Page County. Finally, in August of 1957, Judith Anderson disappeared while going home from a friend’s house, and a week later her mutilated, dismembered body surfaced inside two 55-gallon drums floating in Montrose Harbor, not far from our house.

These six horrific murders in two years signaled a drastic change, as our local world suddenly and violently became a far more dangerous place. Parents feared for the safety of their children, and the children, too ignorant to fully comprehend the new order and the dangers around, rebelled against the new restrictions. Though our wider travels across all of Chicagoland on the CTA were reined in, my buddies and I continued our adventures around our north side neighborhoods, adventures that became clandestine and unknown to our parents.

copyright 2005 by Chuck Morlock